Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to the field of electronic communications. More specifically, and without limitation, the exemplary embodiments described herein relate to systems and methods for managing electronic communications among enterprises and/or other entities.
Background
Various instant messaging (IM) services have provided users with the ability to communicate electronically in real-time with one another. With the rise of social networking and short message service (SMS) communications, public IM service usage has declined. Enterprise IM usage, however, has increased in recent years. This increase in enterprise IM usage may be attributed, at least in part, to enterprise adoption of unified communication (UC) suites.
Unified communication is the integration of various real-time communication services, such as IM, telephony, video conferencing, and data sharing (e.g., electronic whiteboards), with various non-real-time communication services, such as voicemail, e-mail, SMS, and fax. Among other advantages, UC allows a user to send a communication via one medium (e.g., telephone/voicemail) and have a UC user receive the message via a different medium (e.g., e-mail). For example, an individual may call a UC user and leave that user a voicemail, and the UC software may use a common encoding protocol (e.g., .WAV, .mp3) to save the voicemail as an audio file and send that file to the user via e-mail. The variety of communication mediums integrated in UC suites make them particularly attractive to enterprises and other entities as tools for streamlining enterprise communications.
Enterprises not only use UC suites to facilitate communication among users within the same enterprise, but also use these suites to facilitate communication among users from different enterprises. For example, two enterprises that establish a partnership to achieve a business goal may require a tool for facilitating communications among users working to achieve that goal within each of the enterprises. Accordingly, the enterprises may configure their UC suites to interoperate, such that information pertaining to the common goal of the enterprises may be exchanged more easily between users from the different enterprises.
Current techniques for establishing interoperability between UC suites of different enterprises suffer from several drawbacks. For example, current techniques for enabling inter-enterprise communications require that two enterprises establish an agreement between them (e.g., a “federated agreement”), and each enterprise must manually configure its server to enable communications with the other. Although this may be only a minor hindrance when an enterprise has a small number of business partners, the management of enterprise servers can become quite complex when enterprises wish to federate with multiple other enterprises. Further, current techniques for establishing communications between enterprises make it difficult to determine the array of potential partnerships available to an enterprise or the communication capabilities of each potential partner. Thus, many existing inter-enterprise communication arrangements are based on pre-existing business relationships. Moreover, software and hardware supporting such inter-enterprise communications are manually configured.
The drawbacks of conventional techniques for establishing communications between enterprises hinder the ability of enterprise users to engage in inter-enterprise communications. For example, the difficulty of establishing manual connections between enterprises discourages federated communications between enterprises. Moreover, enterprises are unaware of potential enterprise partners with whom they may communicate because no directory currently exists for identifying enterprises that are willing and able to form federation agreements with other enterprises. Even in a situation where an enterprise may be aware of the existence of potential enterprise partners, the enterprise may be unable to discern the communication architecture and/or capabilities of those potential partners and, thus, unable fully to understand the potential for federated communications between enterprises.